David McElroy

Buckminster Fuller was an architect, engineer, writer, inventor and futurist, but he was also a rebel who was kicked out of Harvard twice and never finished there. After he was admitted for the second time, he was expelled for “irresponsibility and lack of interest.” He had no interest in the existing systems and practices he found. He was only interested in inventing the future — in bringing to life the vision he saw in his own mind.

Fuller saw different ways of designing and engineering buildings, among other things. He didn’t try to convince architects and engineers that their conventional designs were wrong. He didn’t care about fighting them. He simply went about the work of inventing what he saw in his mind’s eye. He was very conscious of this approach.

“You never change something by fighting the existing reality,” Fuller said. “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

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After a federal judge ordered the New York City Police Department to stop violating the rights of innocent people, all NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg could do was whine about the potential dangers of respecting the rights of the innocent.

For more than a decade, New York City police have randomly stopped pedestrians and questioned them, then frisked them for weapons. Bloomberg defends the program as saving lives, but he doesn’t understand that we have constitutional rights that protect us against unreasonable searches. He doesn’t get to decide when to ignore our rights.

Since 2004, NYC police have made 4.4 million stops and frisked 2.3 million people. Federal Judge Shira Scheindlin noted in her ruling that no weapons were found in 98.5 percent of the frisks. That means that nearly all of those 2.3 million people searched for weapons were innocent — and the searches took place without cause and without any guilt on their part.

Under the NYC program, there didn’t have to be any reason to suspect anyone. Police were encouraged to search more and more people — and the real-world results have been that the vast majority of those searched have been young black and Hispanic men. The judge called it a form of racial profiling.

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This is the time in the election cycle when I’m starting to hear from a lot of people asking for support in the 2014 election. Some people want moral support. Others want money. (Well, they all want money.)

Many of them are good people and I like a lot of them. But I can’t support any of them in good conscience, because I can’t support the system they’ve chosen to join. To save myself from having to reply to every candidate personally and explain the reason, let me explain to everybody all at once.

If you’re running for office, I don’t necessarily oppose you personally, but I oppose the entire system of coercion that majoritarianism represents. You’re probably a decent person. You probably mean well. But for anything to change, the entire structure of the system has to change. Just electing you — or even hundreds or thousands of people like you — isn’t going to change anything.

If you grew up in this country, you were probably taught to revere the political system that’s in place. You heard propaganda in school about how great the system was. You were taught that “democracy” and “freedom” mean the same thing. (You were lied to.) You were taught the fiction that if honest men (and women) would just “do the right things,” the system would produce peace, prosperity and freedom for all. After all, it worked in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” didn’t it?

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